


like the holding of hands, like the breaking of glass

by irisesandlilies



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Codependency, First Kiss, Hand Jobs, Healing, Healing Sex, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:07:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29596695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisesandlilies/pseuds/irisesandlilies
Summary: The ache in his heart swells, pushes at his sternum and catches his breath. It’s a warm feeling, liquid almost. It starts in his nose and radiates across his jaw, down his throat and sparkling in his chest, so peculiar but not at all unfamiliar.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 7
Kudos: 45





	like the holding of hands, like the breaking of glass

**Author's Note:**

> written for [soulmate bingo](https://soulmatebingo.tumblr.com/)!! I saw the healing touch prompt and just ran with it. 
> 
> title from [wasteland, baby!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4rKN_qW5DU&ab_channel=HozierVEVO) by hozier <3

**_1934_ **

Steve’s sixteen, sporting dust and blood when it first happens. He always presents himself bleeding to Bucky, like a terrible rendition of a crucifix. Bucky takes him in anyways, always will. 

“What was it this time?” Bucky steps back and squints in the low light of the washroom to assess the full extent of Steve’s latest righteous scuffle. The curve of his nose has been rewritten again and again, crooked lines that match the rest of him. 

Steve clumsily sidesteps the question, tilting his weight towards the sink and bites out, “just set it before my ma sees, Bucky.”

“Don’t get smart.”

“Too late.” 

Bucky laughs softly at that, just a suggestion of the noise. Barely a taste for Steve to steal from the air. Steve wriggles slightly, trying to chase it, like it’s the only thing that sustains him. Maybe it is. 

“Just hold still for a second, would ya?” Bucky mutters, his tone more entrenched in affection than anything else. The porcelain digs with insistence into Steve’s lower back as Bucky shifts closer. His fingers hover at the purple and blue hues saturating the pale skin beneath Steve’s eyes, Steve recoils at the suggestion of contact. Bucky hums a short discontented noise, shifting his steady gaze briefly from the crooked lines drawn in blood to Steve’s eyes. 

Bucky’s expression reads anxious, odd as he’s done this repeatedly before. There’s something there, in his gaze, breathing shallow and resigned. Like it’s been battling towards the surface only to be pushed back down again and again. 

He sets fingers delicately at either side of Steve’s nose and Steve braces himself for the familiar flare of sharp pain. A blistering moment that always fades quickly to be replaced by a dull ache. Something akin to the glare that ignites in Steve’s chest at the proximity of Bucky, a blinding burn that threatens to pour out his mouth as words, as a confession, before fizzling into a tender and ever-present bruise. 

The ache in his heart swells, pushes at his sternum and catches his breath. It’s a warm feeling, liquid almost. It starts in his nose and radiates across his jaw, down his throat and sparkling in his chest, so peculiar but not at all unfamiliar. 

“Buck?”

He had closed his eyes somewhere in the expectancy of it all, opens them now in wonder. He’s trying to pursue the feeling, swallow it whole until it consumes him, makes him glow warm in places he’s never felt before. Like something that has always lived in his chest is stirring awake. 

Bucky’s eyes are wide with awe. Maybe fear. Steve’s brow furrows, studies the features he knows in low light, in charcoal, ink, and in sunlight. 

“What?” 

Bucky’s hands settle at the hard lines of Steve’s hips, his grip testing. Steve’s weary lungs miss the cue to take his next breath, returning as a quiet gasp against Bucky’s mouth. Because there it is again, golden, perfect, Bucky. It’s addictive, floods his veins and rewrites his thoughts, his needs, and his wants. 

There’s a hitch, breathing in the scent of blood and Bucky. There’s nothing Steve knows better. 

He watches Bucky’s throat work around a reply, a stuttering sound before he pauses, deems the best response is to show Steve for himself. Bucky’s hands at his waist direct him into an easy turn, if the moment weren’t so absurd, so stunning, Steve might give him grief for handling him like that. Bucky was always careful to level their sizes, their strengths, he seems to forget himself in the moment. That scares Steve most. 

“What’d you do?” He means to ask in more ways than one. 

Steve’s mouth is bright with blood, vibrant red fading into rust, it’s as expected, recognizable really-

Steve’s fingers tremble when they find his face, guided in the reflection. The bruise is gone altogether, just as it was beginning to smear an awful arrangement across his face. The drying blood serves as the only indication a wound had ever existed. 

“Bucky?”

“I set it,” Bucky answers and it sounds more like another question. “Does it hurt?” 

Bucky’s grip tightens, his fingertips insistent at Steve’s hipbones and he squirms. An uneasy breath in and he replies, “Not anymore.” 

“Huh.”

Steve watches Bucky’s reflection glow with the revelation, the divot pronounced at his brow as his handsome face folds in thought. Steve wonders if he felt it too. Or maybe he’s taken one too many hits to the head, unrelenting affections morphing into nonsensical sensations. He’s lovesick and hurting and it was taking shape in something tangible to his senses. 

“Steve?” 

Bucky has never said his name like that. The cadence unmatched, two halves anxious and earnest. Steve’s heart climbs his throat, hammering violently in protest as he tries to swallow all the buried feelings away. From the fragment of his reflection, Steve can see the uncertainty sour Bucky’s expression, drawing his mouth into a pout. Steve carefully turns away from their mirrored impressions, feels Bucky’s hands move with his waist, delicate but resolute. Like he can’t stand to remove them, can’t stand to not be joined by touch with Steve. That isn’t new, and this feeling isn’t really either. It’s always been humming in their veins, waiting for ignition. He sets his fingertips at the seam of Bucky’s lips, testing, brazen. 

Bucky trembles, breathes a wobbling sigh against the pads of his fingers. Steve can see it, the warmth gleams in Bucky’s eyes, shades the cold gray a flushed hue of lovesick. Steve takes a pause, allows for the objections Bucky would never give, replaces his fingers with his mouth. It’s so eager they’re clumsy with it, soft and wet and perfect. Steve careens into the kiss, pushes into the heat of Bucky’s mouth to taste him. Like the familiar sweetness of him will carry Steve across lifetimes, just clinging to the memory of this. He’s never felt so whole, like some part of him was always close but has finally fallen into place. The ache in the vicinity of Steve’s chest wanes into contentment too. 

This time he exclaims softly into Bucky’s mouth, “huh.”

“Doesn’t hurt anymore.” Bucky says faintly, dizzy with it. 

**_1943_ **

Steve’s head is swollen with blood and tears, his heart swollen with a persistent ache. The blood-stained rag catches a muffled sob, punctuated with a twinge at his side. His ribs match his heart, bruised and broken and not quite the same. He’ll keep chasing scrapes and scuffles until he comes close to the torment Bucky’s enduring across the ocean. It still won’t be enough. He still won’t be enough. 

When he tries to breathe it feels incomplete, lost in the taste of blood and the immense space distress assumes in his chest. Bucky’s been gone long enough now that the walls of the apartment have forgotten him, the floorboards don’t creak with his weight and the sheets don’t remember a time before Steve slept alone. It’s hell and the only person, the only touch that could remedy it isn’t there.

Steve has just days left in the lonely place, just days until he’s following Bucky to Europe. Where else would he have gone? He would follow Bucky anywhere. He closes his eyes and imagines Bucky’s palm curled around his side. Imagines the horror of war softened by his efforts as a valiant soldier, by their skin pressed together. He’s only ever wanted two things, to be a person, a worthy person, and to belong to Bucky. 

His heart breaks completely and suddenly with the need for it, to prove himself to the world and return to the only person he never had to convince of his worth. 

His broken heart takes weeks to heal. It never really heals. 

**_1943, continued_ **

It’s not enough, but it’ll do. A refuge carved out in the heart of London, in the thick of battle. But it’s theirs for a fleeting moment and they cling to it. 

Melded against each other isn’t enough, but it’ll do. They’re shaking, overwhelmed with the glow of it, the completeness of their touch. It was a sudden detox and a perfect, painful re-tox. It’s the ache of the realization, two halves of one soul can’t go on without the other. What were they without the other? What were they if they weren’t whole?

“Steve.” 

It’s distant, disbelieving. Bucky’s fingers curl against Steve’s shoulder, trying to anchor himself to the little moment they have. The reprieve in the horror of it all.

“Steve,” Bucky whispers again with more insistence, leans up to catch Steve’s mouth. Bucky kisses him violently, like he’s trying to take every last bit of Steve, his strength, his devotion, and Steve will let him. Always. “I missed you so bad, Steve.”

Steve’s fingertips drag lightly along the shadowy bruises at Bucky’s temple, the gash high on his cheek. Steve can’t stand the sight of them, savors the way the marks give into the perfect pallor of Bucky’s skin, unblemished and erased from the history of his face. The serum hadn’t dare alter their shared ability, the power that seems to be bound to their souls. 

_So, good becomes great._

Bucky trembles slightly, swallows down a whimper as he tilts his head slightly and presses his mouth intently to the inside of Steve’s wrist. Steve’s pulse is at his lips, to remind him he’s real, they’re real. 

Steve moves lower, Bucky’s ribs press into the palms of his hands. Steve tips his forehead against Bucky’s sternum, his lips moving wordlessly against his taut skin. He hears Bucky’s heartbeat erratic and loud, even in his lame ear. It’s not anymore. He gets it all back, even the things he didn’t know to miss. He never thought he’d have this again. Thought he’d lost Bucky. It’s overwhelming, slams against Steve at full force and tests the capacities of his new form. He presses the unaltered crook of his nose into Bucky, Bucky had healed his nose before the serum healed everything else and Steve wears the proof on his face. Steve feels Bucky’s heart match the thrum in his ears, he wishes so wildly that he could crawl into Bucky and stay there. Never apart, always touching him. 

“I love you.” He loves Bucky so much it hurts, it always has. It’s the one thing they can’t heal and they wouldn’t dare try. 

Bucky doesn’t respond, not audibly but Steve knows anyways. Knows that Bucky can’t say it back in that precious moment without breaking. 

He ventures back towards Bucky’s mouth, pauses at his chin and places wet little kisses at the cleft there. He holds his face in his hands, framing the boyish swell of his cheeks and looks at him, really looks at the boy he’s loved so long. Steve strokes the pads of his thumb beneath the dark rings around Bucky’s eyes, they look enough like bruises that Steve thinks he can wipe them away. And Bucky’s not there, his eyes shine with an emptiness that’s been lurking at the edges for a while now. It’s more pronounced now than it’s ever been. Steve adorns the divot of his brow with a kiss, light and careful. 

“Hey.” 

Bucky’s gaze is slow to focus, searching Steve’s expression for something tender to latch onto. Steve thumbs over the lines by the corners of Bucky’s eyes, little tokens of laughter that are fading with disuse. “Tell me what you need.” 

Bucky’s mouth twists, like the words won’t take shape on his tongue. His grip tightens where it’s settled on the slant of Steve’s waist, still slim and still impossibly fits in Bucky’s hands. 

“Anything.” He means it, because it’s Steve and he would take anything Steve gave him. 

Steve nods, bumps his mouth against Bucky’s to push past the seam of his lips and kiss him hard, bruising. He won’t ever get enough, he couldn’t. He reaches a hand between them, gropes at the soft lines of Bucky’s cock over the fabric. 

He breaks the kiss, sparingly to ask, “It’s only you, you know that, Buck?” He squeezes gently, “no one else has ever touched me. I’m only yours.” 

Bucky sighs softly against his mouth and takes shape in something like heartbreaking relief. Steve bows his head to suckle soft marks along Bucky’s pulse, just to swipe his fingertips across them and watch the darkening imprint of his teeth and tongue disappear. A nip at the sharp jut of Bucky’s collarbone earns a low moan and Steve presses a slight smile against his skin. 

“You know what we’ve got, what we can do to each other with our hands. Take the hurt away. It’s like that when you’re inside of me. When you’re touching me.” Bucky’s slowly swelling against the curve of Steve’s palm, achingly familiar and so badly missed. Steve fumbles with the button of his trousers, “only us. Only _you_.”

“Yeah, Steve.” It’s breathless. 

Steve wonders if he really gets it. If his words are enough to tear apart the hasty walls Bucky’s been constructing since he’d been rescued. It’s just Bucky and it’ll always be Bucky. They are so many people Steve could love easily but doesn’t, because none of them have what he and Bucky have. The touch, the shared soul. None of them are Bucky. 

Steve’s words mimic his hands, like balm on Bucky’s soul. Steve leans close to kiss him and Bucky meets him halfway, breaths a high, contented exhale when Steve rubs the head of his cock through the dampening fabric. 

Steve slips his fingers beneath Bucky’s waistband, strokes with just the suggestion of a touch, “never’ll love anyone like you, Buck.” 

Steve’s careful, tries to keep it delicate. He’s on the cusp of proving that whatever was done to him didn’t change anything that mattered. The serum rewrote his cells, not his soul. 

Finally, Steve swallows the blissful sound Bucky gives when he grips him, feels it glow in his chest. It’s everything they’ve known and everything they haven’t. His artist’s hands are now those of a soldier, calloused and aching with battle. It’s the warmth, the distinguished soothe of Steve’s fingertips that stitch together their past and their present. 

_“Oh-”_

Steve grins against the juncture of Bucky’s jaw, drags his thumb across the slick underside of Bucky’s cock, fully hard now, pausing at the tender spot beneath the head to punch another soft gasp from Bucky’s throat. 

Bucky places his sweet groans against Steve’s shoulder, stifles a cry when Steve’s teasing blunders into a perfect, urgent rhythm. 

“Tell me how it feels, Buck.” 

Bucky’s back arches, fucks himself into Steve’s fist. He can’t tell Steve, can’t tell Steve everything he already knows, already feels because he’s heaving sobs. It’s everything, everything he stowed inside him while Hydra dug into him and tried to take it. 

This was what Steve had needed from him. He didn’t want to hurt Bucky, but he couldn’t heal any wounds until they were brought to the surface. Bucky’s laid out before him now, eyes wet, his cock a throbbing and perfect weight against Steve’s palm, his heart bleeding. 

“So good, Buck. So good to me.” A sob ripples through Bucky’s chest, his face turned into Steve’s neck. Steve kisses the side of his face, along his temple and the high arch of his cheek, anywhere he can reach. He breathes warm at the shell of Bucky’s ear, “Thought I lost you, but you’re here. You’re mine. Couldn’t live without you, ever.” 

Bucky can’t fathom words, any warning, but Steve knows he’s close. Knows the pitch of his whimpers and slick of him better than anything. He knew Bucky before tactical plans and medals. Before stage routines and stolen titles. He’ll never forget that. 

Steve curls himself more tightly around Bucky, his new body sheathes him entirely. It’s odd, different, but it’s good. In that moment it’s what they need. Steve kisses his cries and smooths his tear tracks. 

“It’s okay, I have you. _I love you_.”

Bucky suddenly comes, a seemingly unrelenting trust he gives Steve in spurts across his hand and their chests. The frantic sobs continue, exhausting and agonizing. 

Steve watches his face, the quiet shifts in his expression as it torrents through him. It pulls all the pain to the surface, leaving Bucky feeling raw and hurting. 

“Buck.” 

Steve’s making promises against Bucky’s lips again, achingly sweet sentiments that don’t register to Bucky’s ears but are felt in his chest. Steve puts his hands anywhere he can reach, like maybe he’ll reach Bucky’s soul and heal that with his touch too. 

Bucky’s tears subside with the insistence of Steve, wane into weak mewls with each touch and whispered word. Maybe Captain America is good for something, but Steve Rogers is even better. 

His voice is wrecked, raw and misshapen when he tries Steve’s name. Steve drags the tears from his hairline and carries light fingers across his scalp. Steve’s patient. He would wait forever for Bucky. 

Steve’s still impossibly hard, hurting with it. Bucky knows, because of course he does. He would know it even if Steve weren’t pressed impossibly tight against him. 

He starts, a rough whisper of a thing, “you didn’t-”

Steve catches the hand Bucky weaves between them, draws it to his mouth and kisses his knuckles. 

“Don’t worry about me.” 

“M’always worrying ‘bout you.” 

Steve kisses his forehead, scratches lightly at the back of his neck, “I know.” 

Bucky’s eyes slowly close, a delicate gesture to demonstrate the unyielding trust and wild affection that could only be earned by holding your very own soul in your arms, feeling them breathe against you. 

“I love you, Steve. So much.” 

A blink of a kiss, just a fleeting thing is punctuated with Steve’s voice, threatening to break with the weight of it, “you don’t know the half of it, Buck.” 

**_2013_ **

What was he if he wasn’t whole?

The answer is erratic, chasing death and never quite catching it. Another want, a need Steve can’t reach. His hands are useless if they always come up short. 

He’s bleeding, acquainting himself with the cold hurt because he’ll never have the warm remedy again. He closes his eyes to savor it, to curse the serum for its pathetic replication of the healing he used to know. It’s the worst, most deserved feeling he can think of. Across the quinjet he can feel her stare, penetrating in all the worst ways. Like she knows what it’s like to lose. She knows what it’s like to have people look right through you, never seeing anything important about your worth as a human being. 

He hasn’t heard a voice so soft and equally stern in a long time, “You should have that looked at.” 

He wishes she would stay silent, watch him bleed like everyone else has for so long now. See a man wandering through time, brandishing wounds and ignore him so completely. If he’s not ignored it’s superficial pity, sad smiles and unpleasant small talk, all the while neglecting his pleas beneath it all. He doesn’t want pity, doesn’t want the sad smiles and unpleasant talk, and she doesn’t offer it. It’s just a bone-deep knowing that frightens him. 

He groans with the effort of speech, feeling it pull at the flesh and sinew slowly weaving itself back together, “m’ fine.” 

She quirks her head, narrows her eyes in such a way that makes him think he can tell her. Maybe it’s something she earned in her training, a sense of trustworthiness that entices even the most hardened souls. Because all that’s wanted in a confidential exchange is for the secret to be held, regarded in silence. She’s good at that. She learned secrets before she knew anything else. 

And maybe it’s not a secret. It’s just something he keeps close, carries it like a secret because it’s precious, It’s all he has left of him, held in his heart, which always belonged to Bucky anyways. 

“Natasha.” 

Her fixed gaze hasn’t left him, not really, but her name aloud brings her razor-sharp attention aimed in his direction. He hasn’t seen her pause until this moment, always oriented toward a goal he can’t identify. Always in motion. Finally, he sees her hesitate, really look at him, not as a means in achieving an objective but as a person. He hasn’t felt seen in this century until now, bleeding and begging for someone’s attention, someone’s help. Someone to peel off the veneer of the character and recognize him as a person. 

She does. 

“Steve.” 

It’s not _Rogers_ , it’s not _Cap_ , it’s Steve. Her mouth quirks, like she recognizes she’s unraveling something warped and delicate. It will quickly become his favorite expression that she wears. She’s holding the stripped caricature in her hands, staring now at Steve Rogers, the hook of his nose and the defeat in his eyes. 

“Will you let someone get a look at that wound now?”

He lets her look at a different wound, one that hurts far worse. He presses the heel of his palm more intently to his side, sets his jaw and decides on the words.

“I don’t want to be touched.” Not by anyone that isn’t the boy he lost to war and his own failures.

She pauses, he can almost see the gears sputter in her brilliant head. A profound understanding seems to consume her, wipe the expression from her face and replace it with something tender and entirely unfamiliar to him. The knowledge she has of him rounds out, becomes whole. She nods, a slight gesture that feels like everything to him. She doesn’t have to touch him to wipe away the blood he’s been trailing in his wake. 

“Okay.”

“Yeah?” 

She appears to him more softly now, a privilege he’s earned in exchange. She’s gentle, almost fond when she replies, “yeah.” 

**_2014_ **

The soldier lurches, staggers with the force of each blow he aims. It’s the most perfect, most ineffective fight that has ever been fought. Every hit they place on the other heals the previous wound, that unreal flare of bliss that emanates as something intense and full. 

They had shaken until they had fallen apart after just months without it and Steve had chosen death over the prospect of never feeling it again. Now, it counters him, unhinged and absolute. It’s the worst moment of Steve’s life and the best he’s felt in a century. It should feel like pure agony and all he feels is bliss. He’s going to die there and it’s okay because each strike drowns him in warmth, tears the affection from his chest and arranges it into words. 

Maybe he should have known all those years, his heart kept beating, his soul kept existing, his body would have never managed the effort if Bucky had not been out there somewhere. Steve would have wilted, died clinging to the side of that train car too if the impact of the fall had killed Bucky. Steve should have known he could not have kept existing without the other half of his soul still existing too. 

And what a privilege to finally find death like this. To reach the end of the line not in a snowy abyss, screaming with grief, but to arrive lying down with the weight of his soul pressing against him.

For all the times Steve wanted so badly to give in, to surrender, this is the one time he does. He looks into the soldier’s eyes and sees the warmth skirting at the edges, swallowing the darkness and returning the body to Bucky. He feels it push at the lead in his abdomen, piece together the bones in his face. 

It doesn’t hurt, not anymore. 

The fall, the clatter of the mask on pavement, the whispering memories, none of it hurts anymore with Bucky’s grip bearing down on his shoulder, his fist raised for the final blow. 

Not anymore. 

**_2016_ **

“Hey, Buck.” 

Steve crosses the room, kneels at the foot of the bed, waiting, wanting. Bucky’s splayed across the sheets, chest bare and rising gently. He’s studying Steve tenderly, without tact, nothing of the soldier and all of the boy Steve’s loved so long. When he outstretches his right arm, his palm is open in suggestion. 

Steve’s eager, teetering on the edge of frightening with enthusiasm. He never thought he’d have this again. He takes Bucky’s hand, something to fasten him to a moment of peace in a lifetime stained with tragedy and sacrifice. When Bucky’s hand isn’t enough, he crawls forward to straddle his thighs. Steve toes the quiet line he’s been careful not to cross, watching and waiting for signs. He had missed them for years as a teenager so he takes a chance now, brings their twined fingers to his mouth. 

There’s a vibrant flicker in the depths of Bucky’s expression, slow to appear at the surface, but Steve can read it anyways. They had fallen back into the fight like they’d never been apart, two soldiers moving as one. This was no different. Steve mouths at Bucky’s fingers, kisses the curve of his palm and veins of his wrist. Steve’s eyes never stray from Bucky’s, assessing, asking. Steve can feel it through the ties that bind them, knows and understands it, there’s nothing he could give that Bucky wouldn’t take, wouldn’t want. 

“How’s it looking? He asks against Bucky’s palm, etches his lips into the fine lines there. 

“Not great.” 

There’s something like a grimace playing across Bucky’s face, an expression that seems to be permanently pasted across his weary features. The ghost of the soldier. 

“What is it?” Steve drags his thumb across a lingering bruise on Bucky’s knuckles, watches it fade into a perfect pale. It never gets old. Never. 

Bucky shakes his head, steals his hand back from Steve and reaches to smooth over the lingering wound discoloring his cheekbone in return. “They really fucked it up. Fucked me up.”

Steve swallows hard, nods. Says nothing because there’s nothing to say. He can’t heal wounds that have already scarred over. He’ll keep trying though. 

“Doctors’ll have to do surgery of some sort. It’s attached to my spine.” 

Steve summons the bit of fight left in him to repress a shudder, stilling his fists and composing his face into a semblance of a grin. 

“Easy enough. I’ll be there.”

Bucky’s face draws into that quiet smile that Steve always caught when he’d look up from his sketchbook, stare across the fire at camp, trace with his mouth in shadowy canvas. Steve swells with it, he’s missed him something awful. 

It must show on his face, so heartbroken and relieved, because Bucky’s expression shifts into something even gentler and he skirts the back of his hand across Steve’s jaw. Slow and perfectly familiar. Steve places a hand at the center of Bucky’s chest, spreads his fingers and feels his heartbeat. They go on like that, hands coasting along each other's skin. 

Bucky’s voice is soft, “hey.” 

Bucky’s fingers at the seam of Steve’s lips feel like home, a touch that accomplishes more than two apartments in two cities ever could. Fills him up and makes him whole. Steve kisses Bucky’s fingertips, opens his mouth slightly in invitation. Bucky presses his forefinger further, gentle and curious to relearn things he already knows somewhere inside him. Steve sucks lightly, just to taste him after so long. 

“I love you, you know that? Never stopped.” Bucky doesn’t know when it began either. 

Steve lets Bucky’s finger slip free with a little obscene sound, his mouth slides into a crooked grin against Bucky’s fingers, like he can taste the words on his fingertips and it’s bliss. 

“Yeah. I love you too, Buck.”

The sentiment settles in the air, across the linen, and in their bones. 

In the perfect calm of it all is a dare, a challenge, “show me.”

It’s one that Steve could never say no to, not back in Brooklyn and not now in a white room with misty views. 

Steve leans down to press him into the mattress, kisses him frantically, making up for so much lost time. He pulls Bucky against him and reaches into him to take his broken heart. He holds it in his hands and watches it mend, scrapes his bruised insides clean until he’s bleeding pure and swearing up and down that Steve takes care of him better than anyone. Steve’s better for him than anyone. Just to hear him affirm it after all these years. 

He sucks at Bucky’s bottom lip, just keen enough to bruise before he presses a finger to him and smooths it away. 

“The whole breaking the law thing wasn’t enough proof?”

“You’ve broken the law for less.” Bucky laughs into his mouth, sweet and perfect. Those soft little exhales that Steve used to chase and stuff in his lungs to breathe more easily. The serum hadn’t changed that, hadn’t changed the way Steve needed Bucky to breathe. He takes his first real inhale in decades. 

“What about pulling that helicopter out of the sky with my bare hands?” 

“That was just you showing off.” 

Steve presses his mouth to Bucky’s, slow, eager. He chases it desperately even after they break to breathe. He’s dizzy with the taste of Bucky’s laughter, swallows the sound and holds it in his chest to warm the parts that never thawed with the rest of him. 

“Y’know me too well, Barnes.”

“Always have.”

He drags the tip of his index carefully along the seam of scars, catching on gnarled tissue and careening onto metal. “Yeah.” It’s an absentminded reply as he replaces his fingertips with his mouth, soft and woefully tender. 

“Steve.” 

He presses his cheek to the place where the other half of his soul meets planes of metal and exposed wiring, eyelids fluttering towards Bucky’s voice. Bucky’s watching him with a golden expression, to have lacked something so long and to have it back feels like being made whole. Feels like finally finding a soft landing. 

“Does it hurt?” Steve asks, knowing the answer and already drunk with it. 

“Not anymore.”

**Author's Note:**

> will i stop writing little snapshots of them through time? no.
> 
> as usual, I'm too scared to have anyone beta read so let me know if there's glaring errors
> 
> thank you so much for reading, say hi on [tumblr](https://romanovrogers.tumblr.com/)!


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